You could do that if software vendors bothered to provide the option. To your example, you can download Elasticsearch as an archive from their website [0], una

You could do that if software vendors bothered to provide the option. To your example, you can download Elasticsearch as an archive from their website [0], unarchive it, and you're off to the races. JetBrains IDEs work the same way, grab a zip, unzip it, and bam, you're good to go. They can even keep themselves up to date on their own. It will also install a shortcut in your DE's menu. Ditto for Zoom and 1Passowrd, who even support more "exotic" distributions, such as Arch, on top of Snaps and Flatpaks. While I think that in practice the issues you describe do exist, I think the cause is mainly that Linux is still a second-class citizen and not a priority for vendors to support properly. But hey, at least they try, as opposed to others who don't give a damn at all. --- [0] https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch ; also available as a .deb or .rpm download